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THE HEADLINES

 

SPECIAL DELIVERY

Tesla is back on track to meet its sales goals this year after the company delivered a record 95.2k vehicles in the three months ended June 30th. The figure beat analyst estimates of 90.7k units, saving the electric car maker from taking yet another L.

After delivering just over 90k vehicles during the fourth quarter of 2018, Elon & Co. suffered a huge miss on Q1 deliveries and only shipped 63k units, citing unexpected issues with exporting cars to Europe and China as the main reason why. Elon’s focus on Stankmemes.com certainly didn’t help. Investors feared that people were becoming uninterested in the vehicles after a $7.5k tax credit for purchasers was reduced by half.

In demand

About 77k of deliveries were of the $35k compact Model 3. This is a huge deal for Tesla which is banking on a ramp up in demand for this specific vehicle to take it from a high-end car producer for tech nerds only to rivaling household names like GM.

It’s been a rough year for Elon as the company has had trouble “securing,” its share price. After dropping 33% in the last year, shares rose 7% after hours on the news of a delivery beat.

 

LAGARDE FROM THE TOP ROPE

Tyson-Douglas, Michigan-Appalachian State … and Solomon-Schwartz ain’t got sh*t on the upset brewing at the European Central Bank.

Current International Monetary Fund Managing Director Christine Lagarde has been nominated to lead the European Central Bank, replacing current president Mario Draghi whose term has expired. Ignorant American translation: she will become the equivalent of the Fed’s Jerome Powell, overseeing monetary policy for all EU countries.

The nomination came as a bit of a shock, mostly because speculation had centered around German central bank head Jens Weidmann, French ECB members Benoît Coeuré and François Villeroy de Galhau and former Finnish central banker Erkki Liikanen. But alas, here we are.

She’s not not qualified

Just because the IMF MD doesn’t have a monetary policy Linkedin endorsement, doesn’t mean she isn’t qualified. The boss lady has led the IMF since 2011 where she oversaw Greece’s bailout. NBD. She also worked as an antitrust lawyer in the private sector as the first female chairman of Baker McKenzie, a Chicago-based law firm.

Of course, she’ll inherit a sh*tshow. The bloc’s economy has been struggling and she’ll (likely) take the reins of a Draghi-era stimulus plan that would make way for additional rate cuts as well as a new round of quantitative easing.

 

JUST SHOE IT

An American shoe company celebrating America’s birthday using an old version of the US flag …

What could possibly go wrong? As it turns out, a lot.

Nike pulled its Independence Day kicks from retailers Monday after civil rights activists, namely Colin Kaepernick, requested that the Air Max USA 1 not hit shelves as the Betsy Ross flag that adorned the shoes is used by far-right groups as a symbol of slavery.

This, of course, caused a hullabaloo, with some arguing that the PC culture has gone too far. Nike has commented that it made the decision to halt production and sale “based on concerns that it could unintentionally offend and distract from the nation’s patriotic holiday.” Now, let’s go to PC principal for his opinion …

Nick: “PC principal, how do you feel about the Betsy Ross shoe scenario?”
PC principal: “I don’t know about you, but frankly I’m sick and tired about how minority groups are marginalized in today’s society.”

So, no more shoes, right?

Wrong. Although Nike requested merchants to return the flag shoe, some still made it onto the secondary market. Prices of the AirMax USA 1 have hit $2,500 on sites such as StockX and eBay, roughly 20x the original retail price.

 

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IN OTHER NEWS

• POTUS announced his latest picks for Fed board via twitter … obviously. Judy Shelton is currently the US executive director at the European Bank for Reconstruction and Development and Christopher Waller is the director of research at the St. Louis Fed. Yes, the same Judy Shelton who is a proponent of the gold standard. The announcement comes after Trump decided not to nominate Herman Cain and Stephen Moore following Republican push-back.

 

• Adidas in the UK tried to use AI to create custom Arsenal uniforms for fans who tweeted at the account after it announced its sponsorship of the team. It went about as well as you would imagine, and within hours the company’s auto-generated tweets included anti-semitic content and reference to other English national tragedies. When will companies learn that this will never work in their favor because Twitter is a cesspool of the worst humanity has to offer?

 

• Square is being accused of violating privacy laws after a man in California blamed the company for forwarding a digital receipt containing details of his medical history to one of his friends, whose phone number he used to sign into the Square system. The man paid a bill in May at a health care office that accepted Square. Afterward, Square allegedly sent a text to the man’s friend, linking an invoice with information about the man’s procedure, which attorneys say violates patient confidentiality. A class action suit and an awkward conversation about how one man could have that many STDs are in the works.

 

• Facebook is taking steps to crack down on crackpots who share sensational health claims on the platform. The company said on Tuesday that it had made two changes to its newsfeed algorithm to devalue posts that contain exaggerated claims. The move comes after Facebook has been under attack for allowing potentially harmful “alternative” cancer treatments to gain popularity. In Facebook’s defense, no one should believe that essential oils will cure a tumor. Go see a doctor.

 

• CloudFlare, a service designed to defend web pages from going down … went down on Tuesday. Sites like Medium and Discord were unavailable for hours while the company scrambled to fix a bug that caused one portion of CloudFlare’s network to suck resources from the rest of them. According to CloudFlare, the issue was not the result of an outside attack. Which is exactly what you’d say if your downtime was, indeed, caused by an outside attack.

 

• Packaged vegetables from large retailers like Trader Joe’s, Green Giant, Signature Fams, and Growers Express, have been voluntarily recalled due to concerns about the presence of Listeria. Potentially contaminated products originated at Growers Express’s facility in Biddeford, ME. So far, there haven’t been any reports of illness, but the products affected have been distributed in more than four states in the Northeast. Listeria, if you recall, is the same issue that those Arizona lettuce farmers were dealing with last year. Jokes on Listeria, I haven’t eaten a vegetable since I moved out of my parent’s house.

 

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